Is Tinder’s owner buying Sniffies? What Match Group’s investment means for the gay cruising platform

The parent company of Hinge and Tinder is courting a potential new addition to its roster. Match Group on Monday announced a $100 million investment in Sniffies, a map-based cruising platform for queer men. 

As part of the investment, Sniffies will continue to be led by founder and CEO Blake Gallagher, the company said.

“From the first conversations with the Match Group team, we knew they understood what makes Sniffies different. This partnership is about supporting that, not redefining it,” Gallagher said in a statement on the Sniffies Instagram—which was met with skepticism by followers.

Sniffies launched in 2018 and has three million monthly active users via its web-based platform.

Investing to own?

Match Group’s announcement noted that the minority stake came with the option for a full acquisition in the future. Alongside the Sniffies investment, the company told Bloomberg that it would be winding down Archer, its platform for queer men launched in 2023. 

The company’s strategy with Sniffies mimics the one it followed with Hinge, which Match Group first backed in 2017 and acquired in 2018. Within Match Group, Hinge founder Justin McLeod built that platform into the crown jewel of its portfolio. 

Unlike Hinge, Sniffies has managed to scale to 20 million messages sent daily without a traditional app.

Users access the platform—which shows a map of nearby “cruisers”—via web browser. Though users can register with an email address to keep message history and uploaded photos, they can also join just with their date of birth.

Despite working with Apple to launch an iOS app in March 2025—eliminating the anonymous login option in-app—it was removed within two months for what Sniffies said was “ongoing content restrictions.”’

Seeking queer users

Match Group’s Sniffies investment follows last year’s acquisition of Her, an app for women attracted to women, signaling a focus on courting LGBTQ users as companies like Grindr show growth among part of that demographic.

Grindr remains the leader in the world of LGBTQ-focused dating apps, logging 15 million average monthly users in 2025 (a 5% year over year increase) and 1.26 million average paying users, a 17% increase over 2024. That boosted full-year revenue by 26% year over year, totaling $366 million. 

Where Grindr has been working to shed its reputation as a hookup app, emphasizing dating and expanding its scope to be “the global gayborhood in your pocket”—including telehealth for erectile dysfunction and weight-loss drugs, as well as an ongoing album-promotion partnership with Madonna—Sniffies has made no bones about what the app is for. 

Maintaining the vibe

“Sniffies will always be the unapologetic cruising platform you know and love,” Gallagher’s Instagram statement said, adding that Match Group’s money would go toward platform improvements, tackling spam accounts, and growing its user base. But commenters are worried that the investment—and potential for an acquisition—will change the nature of the app. 

“Highly concerned about this app being allowed to be what it is in order to court investors,” one commenter wrote. 

One user highlighted privacy concerns, citing Match Group’s recent settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which sued the company claiming that its OKCupid app allowed facial recognition technology company Calrifai to access users’ demographic information, location data, and some three million photos, violating its privacy policy. (Match Group did not admit wrongdoing.)

“Seems like on of Sniffies[‘] biggest selling point, anonymity, won’t be lasting long due to this new minority investment,” one commenter wrote. 

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